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What is Burn Up Chart in Agile Software Development?

A Burn Up Chart is a graphical display that accommodates the changing requirements and shows completed work.

The vertical axis in the Burn Up chart shows the amount of work and the horizontal axis shows the time. Burn Up chart is usually a line chart displaying two lines. The first line shows the amount of total work required to complete a project and second line displays the amount of work completed. The second line displaying amount of work completed trends up to meet the line displaying total amount of work.

The amount of work in vertical axis can be displayed in a variety of units as desired by the team such as work-hours, work-days, story points, or any other work unit. The horizontal axis displays time in units such as days, weeks, or sprints. Unlike Burn Down charts, Burn Up charts accommodate changing scope and requirements. For example, the total requirements by Sprint 2 was 400 story points, however, new requirements were introduced and requirements changed to 500 story points by sprint 5 and settled at 480 story points by the end of sprint 6. This is caused by adding or removing features by the customer to the development of the software.

The Burn-up chart is updated at the end of each sprint and shows progress towards delivering the requirements in a release. The chart also shows how much scope is completed by a given sprint and how many sprints will be required to complete the given scope. For Example, 80 Story Points are completed by Sprint 2 and 380 points are completed by Sprint 5. If we were to add 100 more points to the scope at sprint 5, it will take 7 sprints to complete the project.

Burn Up charts are mainly used by software development teams across Sprints to see the progress of the entire development project.

Jagmeet Singh writes about Technology and Business on W3Courses.com. Jagmeet is the owner of Parallel Exchange and developed Phonora Photo Galley software product. In his spare time he enjoys photography and loves to travel.